One Hundred Seventy-Fourth Day of School

No homework tonight.

The 7th will be your child's last day of 1st grade. We will have a final day celebration. I will begin setting up during the brunch at 9:30. Our celebration will begin at 10:05. The children will be released at 12:24 for summer break.

Spring Dance

For Friday's performance, the 1st graders will be seated in the middle of the north side of the performance area. Room 11 will dance closest to the Moneta Street gate or furthest from the microphone. Unfortunately, due to a number of variables, the first grade dance is not quite going as planned. But, hopefully everyone will have fun.

Final Exams

Students brought home their Science and Social Science notes for studying purposes. I suggest quizzing them about the notes they've written. Ask them to express the ideas represented by the various icons.

They will not be bringing any math items home this evening.

Miscellaneous

We begin our final battery of reading tests this week; it is my opinion that this is not an easy test. Next week we will take our final writing exam (I have taken a look at the exam; it seems fairly straight forward without any surprises) along with Social Studies and Science and evaluations (students will be bringing home notes they can study for these two areas).

We are continuing our fraction unit in math. Hopefully students have shown you their daily work and discussed their understanding with you on this topic. Some students have been able to complete more than others. This unit will be followed by a fairly straight forward performance assessment on concepts we have covered.

We will be dressing as rodeo folk (cowboys, ranchers, rodeo clowns) for our spring dance. We will be dancing to Payaso de Rodeo.

Unit 5 Week 4 Preview

We will compare the characteristics of the four seasons. Our oral vocabulary words are blaze, increase, observe, outline, and scorch. Our spelling pattern focus will involve the diphthong: 'ou', 'ow'. Our high frequency reading words are against, below, fall, orange, sure, and yellow. Our reading vocabulary words are: wondered and season. We will again practice our reading comprehension strategy of visualization in order to develop the comprehension skill of sequencing.

We will also revisit the concepts of past and present in Social Studies.

Unit 5 Week 2 Preview

This week we will be focusing on many different scientists and how they develop questions to discover new things about the world around us. We will read about the many contributions of Benjamin Franklin and read again about Alexander Graham Bell. We will also read about the important contributions of George Washington Carver to the field of botany. We will again use the strategy of summary to develop our skill of making inferences, which is probably one of the more difficult comprehension skills to master. When making an inference about material we've read, we connect what we've read to what we already know to draw a conclusion which has not been explicitly stated by the author. Our oral vocabulary words will be: career, curious, fascinating, improve, and investigate. Our site words will be: grew, house, knew, and would. Our reading vocabulary words are: curious, and idea. For spelling and phonics we will focus on the r-controlled vowel 'a' (harm, yarn).

In social studies we will be reviewing the concept of needs vs. wants and the use of money as the basis of our trade system.

For science we will be doing the "fountain experiment" to see how air pressure will interact with water.

Quarterly Math Exam

Scores on third District Quarterly Math Exam will be available for parent inquiry on Tuesday, April 2.